Sunday, November 4, 2007

No rest for the weary

Well, contrary to my intentions of taking it relatively easy on Sunday, I ended up putting in a full day's work, complete with two new problems for two different projects that I'm still in the process of attempting to resolve. One is an optical sensor that is hitting a high temperature limit intermittently, and the other is a programming glitch in a Matlab script. I think I have the latter issue figured out, and just have to wait and see what the project staff have to say about my proposed fix before I run with it. This waiting game for communications from people in the U.S. is probably going to be one of the more difficult issues for me. When I was working flight ops on the SOHO satellite most of the time troubleshooting was something that got jumped on immediately and with all the resources necessary, regardless of the time of day. Here, it's a lot more lax.

Last night I did get to listen to the Mayo Clinic altitude sickness researchers' presentation on their research. It sounds like this is one of the few places where they can get the numbers of people being rapidly exposed to high altitude from sea level. I wonder if they've ever considered working with people on flights from Lima to Cusco, Peru. That's sea level to 12,000 feet in about as long as the flight from McMurdo to Pole. We've had pretty depressed barometric pressure this last week, and it has regularly been at an equivalent altitude of 11,000 feet and higher.